A major computer failure is causing worldwide travel headaches.
A computer failure at Delta Air Lines stranded thousand of passengers Monday.
It started with a power outage at Delta headquarters in Atlanta just after 1:30 a.m. central time Monday.
Other than flights already in the air, all operations were stopped, included Delta flights at D/FW International Airport.
By Monday afternoon, more than 450 flights had been canceled and hundreds more delayed.
What was supposed to be a long day of travel to Europe for the Levinson family of Plano instead turned into a long day of waiting.
Our entire trip has been sort of unraveled,” Robin Levinson told NBC 5 as she waited with her family.
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“We got a notification this morning that some of the flights were delayed, but our flight was only delayed about 30 minutes and we came on to the airport, got checked in," Levinson said. "The flight kept getting pushed back, so we thought to check what was happening to the flight to Rome from Atlanta and come to find out that flight never left Rome.”
On the heals of a similar computer shutdown at Southwest Airlines, Rick Seaney, Founder and CEO of Dallas based farecompare.com, said this points out how dependent we are on technology.
“It really highlights that we are so tied to our digital nature that if anything goes wrong, especially with the power grid or networking equipment or a variety of these other services that are out there, it can completely cripple one of the most important business aspects around,” said Seaney.
He believes airlines need to begin investing recent profits to make sure their networks are up to date.
“You’ve made lots of profits the last 18 months or so. You should be pulling the power on all your services and make sure all your backup and redundancy works,” Seaney explained.
Delta CEO, Ed Bastian, has publicly apologized, but not offered any details on what caused the outage.
